Then & Now: James Dudley

"I'll take your word for it," says James Dudley, Gloucester High School's male student christened ``Most Likely to Succeed'' in 1976, when reminded of the honor 20 years later.

It's not that the honor meant little back then, he hastens to add. "I'm sure it was very important, but life doesn't end there. There's a lot of opportunity for growth all the way along the line."

Dudley, 38, left Gloucester for the University of Virginia, where he "played a lot of Frisbee." Oh, and the GHS student who portrayed Jesus in the school's ambitious production of ``Godspell'' also majored in psychology, after an inspired attempt to follow the lead of his high school chemistry teacher met a U.Va. chemistry professor bent on failing as many students as possible.

Three years into college, hopeful of becoming a doctor, Dudley says he was told that his grades wouldn't get him into medical school. The summer between his junior and senior year, Dudley attended - on a whim - the Navy's aviation officers candidate school in Pensacola, Fla. It was an experience that changed his life.

No, he didn't become a pilot. A summer in boot camp made his military future clear enough.

"I figured, hell's bells, if I can go back to college and just apply myself ..." Dudley says as his voice trails off. "I knew it wasn't a question of being stupid; it was a question of being disorganized. I decided to keep after this pre-med stuff."

So he did. Dudley graduated from U.Va. in 1980. He was accepted on his second attempt to get into Eastern Virginia Medical School, from which he graduated in 1985.

During his last year of residency in family practice at Riverside Regional Medical Center, Dudley's father died of a heart attack.

Dudley and his wife Carolyn, an artist, ended up moving in with Dudley's mother, an arrangement that lasted until about a year ago, when the fourth Dudley baby was on the way. (James and Carolyn have two boys and two girls, ages 6, 4, 2 and 4 1/2 months.)

Dudley went to work in Gloucester with Raymond Brown, a quintessential country doctor who was his family's physician when Dudley was a kid.

For the past seven years, Dudley has been the emergency room physician at Riverside Tappahannock Hospital. He took the job thinking that it'd last a year or so. He's still there, he says, because he's still learning.

"The work is exciting at times, although not nearly as exciting as it is on TV," he says. "I like the people I work with. It's a challenge, and you get to do an awful lot of medicine."

Dudley also has a small practice based out of Sanders Nursing Home in Gloucester Court House.

He is pursuing an MBA degree at Virginia Commonwealth University - "for what, I don't know" - and just passed the half-way mark of the two-year program.

A lot has changed since 1976, he says. The ponytail is gone. The crushed velvet blazer with dangerously wide lapels, long discarded. But some things stay the same. Dudley still plays Frisbee.